Sex, the Koch Brothers and Academic Freedom

More than a few of the respondents to my column about CUNY’s on-again-off-again-on-again awarding of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner say that while I may be correct about the “technical” definition of academic freedom, I miss the larger point. That’s because there isn’t one. A board of trustees with every right to make a decision made it in a way that (a) ran counter to its previous practice (b) permitted a single member (Jeffrey Wiesenfeld) to derail a process that had seemed to be on a familiar track and (c) put CUNY right in the middle of the briar patch called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Maladroit, unfortunate and (as I said) dumb. But that’s it. It was just the board screwing up with the predictable public-relations disaster as the result. No one’s freedom was curtailed, no one’s speech was censored, no harm, except to the board’s reputation and by extension to CUNY’s, was done.
Because Wiesenfeld’s objections were to Kushner’s views on Israel, the uproar that followed the board’s decision to table his nomination quickly escalated into a shouting match between those who said that Israel was engaged in ethnic cleansing and those who replied that people who said that were anti-Semites and/or self-hating Jews. The responses to my column followed the same pattern. No one wanted to hear the topic of academic freedom “parsed” (a word used in derision by one reader, as if parsing something, trying to get it right, were a crime). MSP Shiloh complained that “Dr. Fish misdirects our attention to the arcane and off topic of the academic honorary degree process,” when “[t]his was, and is, about Israel’s persecution” of Palestinians. Other respondents were just as sure that “this was, and is, about” a university honoring a “self–righteous hack” (mcghostoflectricity) who spews “current day Palestinian propaganda” (neilrobert). Both sides are wrong, not about Israel – I did not and will not come down on that issue — but about what “this” is about. It’s about institutional ineptness, a relatively small matter that nevertheless can teach us some lessons. The back-and-forth trading of ritual insults is hardly edifying, but a proper understanding of what academic freedom is might be.

My general point is that academic freedom is a useful notion only if it is narrowly defined. More things escape its ambit than fall within it. Lawyerjonathan declares that “the overriding purpose of the university is supposed to be free inquiry and the pursuit of truth.” Not quite. The pursuit of truth is what is done in classrooms and laboratories and that is why those activities should be protected from outside interference. Truth cannot be pursued if constraints in the form of political or ideological preferences block the search for it. Other activities not in the pursuit-of-truth business merit no such protection because there is no specifically academic value to their being allowed to occur without constraint. Mike Munk recalls that when he was a student in the ‘50s, the president of his college vetoed a speaker his group had wanted to invite. He was (and remains) “outraged that our ‘academic freedom’ to hear and debate ideas on campus was violated.” It’s good that he puts academic freedom in quotes because there is no freedom to hear outside speakers; it’s a nice extra, it’s good entertainment, and I’m all for it, but its curtailment violates nothing.

Sasha cooke thinks that the John Jay faculty’s “right to free expression” was violated because its choice of Kushner was originally disallowed. In the same vein, Joe Gould wonders “what effect the Board’s decision on the academic freedom of the faculty who chose Mr. Kushner for the award.” None at all. The faculty expressed itself freely and its free expression was then trumped by the free expression of a body authorized to do so, and in the future the faculty is free to express itself again.

Warren insists that “academic freedom surely extends to the process of receiving academic honors,” but that is to hang too much on a word. True, the honor Kushner was at first denied and now may receive was awarded in a setting presided over by the academy, but it was not an academic honor in the sense of being awarded for academic reasons or according to academic criteria that could be the basis of an academic freedom claim; the reasons for giving honorary degrees are varied and the criteria (such as they are) are all over the place.

Jstafura asks, “If the awarding of honorary degrees isn’t academic then what is it?” As I indicated in the previous column, it’s a tool for fund raising, recruiting, payback for political help, publicity and, occasionally, for rewarding academic or artistic achievement. A corollary question is, if the awarding of honorary degrees is not implicated in academic freedom issues, then what is?

Two examples recently in the news provide an answer. In early March, Professor John Michael Bailey of Northwestern University invited a couple to perform a live sex-act in front of the students in his course on Human Sexuality. (Attendance at the presentation was optional.) The man brought the (naked) woman to orgasm with the help of a device with a name this newspaper will not print.

Bailey defended himself by saying that such “events” provide “useful examples and extensions of concepts students learn about in traditional academic ways.” This statement amounts to acknowledging that the live-sex demonstration was outside the boundaries of academic practice (Bailey might respond that he was stretching the envelope) and it’s an easy step to conclude that it is not protected by academic freedom, by an instructor’s freedom to bring into a class whatever materials he thinks appropriate so long as they serve a legitimate pedagogical end. Bailey claims the live-sex demo did serve such an end because it was an extension of one of his course’s main themes, the diversity of sexual experience.

But Northwestern president Morton Schapiro, after a brief period when the dean and a university spokesman waffled and murmured “academic freedom,” declared, “I simply do not believe this was appropriate … or in keeping with Northwestern University’s academic mission.” That, of course, is the question: was the sexual exhibition staged for a valid educational purpose or was it, as researcher Robin Mathy believes, a case of confusing “voyeuristic excitement” with education. If it was the first, academic freedom kicks in; if it was the second, it doesn’t, and that’s because academic freedom is for academic activities and not for everything that happens to go on in a university building.

The controversy continues. The Northwestern administration has assigned Bailey other courses and said that this course will not be offered in the coming academic year while the curriculum is being reviewed. Now academic freedom complaints are coming from those who say that Bailey’s rights were violated by his not having been allowed to teach a particular course and that the course’s rights were violated by its not being given in a particular year. The administration’s action, said Simon LeVay, author of the course’s text book, amounted to “disrespecting the subject” of human sexuality. Emory Professor Kim Wallen, co-author with LeVay of a letter to President Schapiro, announced, “There’s great concern about academic freedom.”

It’s hard to see why. No one owns a course; no course has a right to be given; and no subject has a claim on university time and money. LeVay and Wallen are behaving as so many in the Kushner controversy did; they are crying academic freedom whenever a university does something they don’t like, and by doing so, they cheapen the concept.

In contrast, the invocation of academic freedom is certainly to the point in my second example, the controversy at Florida State University over a gift given to the economics department in 2008 by a foundation funded by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers. The gift was given to support the creation of two new appointments. There’s nothing untoward about that; it is routine for corporations and foundations to underwrite or augment the funding of faculty appointments. (At Johns Hopkins I held a Kenan chair the support for which came from an oil fortune.) Sometimes the funds are provided without specifying a subject or a discipline; sometimes the gift is more targeted. This gift was very targeted; it was to support the teaching of free-market, anti-regulatory economics.

That’s where the trouble begins. Is the foundation funding the study of free-market economics — a perfectly respectable academic subject — or is it mandating that free-market economics be promoted in the classroom? Is it a gift intended to stimulate research the conclusions of which can not be known in advance, or is it a gift intended to amplify a conclusion — free-market economics is good; regulation is bad — the philanthropists have already reached and want to broadcast using Florida State University as a megaphone? If it is the second, Florida State University courts the danger the doctrine of academic freedom was designed to avoid (see the 1915 statement of the then fledgling AAUP), the danger of allowing an outside constituency to take control of academic proceedings and dictate academic decisions.

Evidence that a line may have been crossed is provided by the contract between the foundation and the university. Foundation representatives serve on the search committee and have the power to veto candidates. If the selected professors fail to perform in a manner the foundations approves, it will withdraw its support. This of course means that the foundation in effect monitors and assesses academic performance. On the other side, the faculty has the decisive voice in making appointments; it need not accept the candidates the foundation favors, and in fact the two who were finally hired were not on the foundation’s preferred list, although we can presume the foundation did not find them objectionable.

In a telephone conversation with me, FSU President Eric J. Barron (who was not in office when this all went down) explained that while the foundation’s representatives could have exercised a veto, it never came to that. He added that if the new faculty members ever failed to meet the foundation’s expectations and its gift was withdrawn, the university would step in and provide the necessary support. He acknowledged that these arrangements might make people nervous — some administration members expressed reservations in 2008 and changes were made to the contract — but he insisted that, despite press characterizations of the situation, FSU had not sold its soul. (I am not a stranger to such situations. My first assignment as a dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago was to finalize the details of a gift given to the university for the funding of a Catholic Studies program. Many of the issues that arose at FSU arose at UIC and were negotiated.)

Barron makes a reasonable case but it is undercut by the words of David Rasmussen, dean of the College of Social Science, a signator to the contract, at FSU. Rasmussen is either tone deaf or disingenuous. His account of the affair is anodyne: “The Economics department says here are the two people we really like, goes to the advisory board and says, will you approve these two people, and they say yes.”

In short, what’s the problem? The problem is that the sequence unfolds under the threat of an adverse action by a non-academic entity. Rasmussen says he is “sure some faculty will say this is not exactly consistent with their view of academic freedom.” The implication is that “their view” is a minority view or an over-fastidious view, but the view that university hiring and firing procedures shouldn’t dance to the tune of an external constituency is absolutely mainstream and is the core of what academic freedom stands for.

Rasmussen’s most egregious comments concern another matter. BB&T, the bank holding company, funds an ethics course on the condition that Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” be required reading. (That might constitute cruel and unusual punishment.) The reasoning, offered by BB&T representative John Allison, is that “most universities are dominated by liberal professors.” (I have argued elsewhere that a scholar’s political views and his or her disciplinary views are independent variables.) Rasmussen thinks this is just fine. “If somebody says, ‘We’re willing to help support your students and faculty by giving you money, but we’d like you to read this book,’ that doesn’t strike me as a big sin.” What would be a big sin, he continues, “is saying that certain ideas cannot be discussed.” No, the sin is to insist that a certain idea be discussed whether or not it has made its academic way because a few disappointed outsiders are willing to spend big bucks to get it inside. If, in the judgment of an instructor, “Atlas Shrugged” will contribute to a student’s understanding of a course’s subject, there is every reason to assign it. But if assigning “Atlas Shrugged” is the price for the receiving of monies and the university pays that price, it has indeed sold its soul.

The Northwestern and FSU examples help us to understand when academic freedom issues legitimately arise. They arise when the university either allows its professors to appropriate the classroom for non-academic purposes, as some think John Michael Bailey did, or allows itself to become the wholly owned subsidiary of another enterprise, as FSU may have done.

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Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami. In the Fall of 2012, he will be Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of 15 books, most recently “Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others”; “How to Write a Sentence”; “Save the World On Your Own Time”; and “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama. “Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution” will be published in 2014.